I was watching the NBA finals the other night and caught a new Canon EOS commercial featuring an original composition by instrumentalist Michael Montes. Instantly hooked. A little digging around on YouTube and some genius managed to reverse engineer the entire song and recreate it just by listening to it. Amazing stuff:
I love cuban culture, the food, the music — it’s rich and fantastic stuff. If you have no idea what cuban music sounds like, then you should check out a band like Manzanita. For example, listen to this sample (a song called El Carretero) on Amazon from their record ‘Gitano Cubano.’
All year I’ve been listening to what I thought was an obscure little album: ‘Raising Sand’ by bluegrass queen Alison Krauss and Led Zeppelin frontman Robert Plant. The two got together for a studio experiment to try and pair Alison’s angelic voice with Plant’s brit-rock craziness. They agreed that if it wasn’t working three days in, they would scrap the project.
Well, it worked. ‘Sand’ is an incredible album: A haunting, mesmerizing piece of musical genius that’s unlike anything I’ve ever heard. If you like classical rock, or bluegrass, or Americana — you will like this album. To my incredible surprise, it just took top honors at the Grammy’s, winning record of the year!
Incidentally, that makes AK the winningest artist (in terms of Grammys) of all time. Wow.
Finding good new music has gotten really hard lately. Sometimes I feel like I’ve heard everything, like there is nothing new left to discover (or at least nothing I would actually like). Enter CD Baby. This site is different from iTunes and all the rest: it’s all brand new independent artists which you’ve never heard.
But it gets better. Anybody who has taken a dive into independent music knows what a mess it can be… you’ve got 10,000 bands and no idea what they sound like. There might be some stuff you would like, but how do you actually find it?!? CD Baby has finally solved this problem. On their main page, click the sounds like button, and you get a huge lists of known bands which in turn lead you to bands which sound like them. iTunes, Amazon, and everybody else have been doing “You might like” recommendations for years, but this is the first time I’ve seen it done with independents.
For example, I went down the ’sounds like U2′ road, and stumbled on this band Signal Goodbye with this track which you can listen to. And you get instant MP3 downloads. Brilliant.
